Idea

Death and taxes were the only guarantees in life until Man invented meetings. So as long as we’re guaranteed to have meetings we might as well try to make the best of them. There’s plenty of info, tips & tricks to run more productive meetings but what happens after the meeting? How does all that stuff get done? If you’re like me you take a ton of meeting notes to keep track of everything. But after the meeting how do we process and execute on all the stuff within those notes & chicken scratch created during meetings?

A pretty typical scenario for me is to have several meetings over several days where each meeting generates pages of notes. Some time later when revisiting those notes I found that trying to interpret the action items and key points of the meeting was taking way too much brain power. I was trying to decipher page after page of chicken scratch to figure out what I had captured, what needed to be done and where I could delegate. Not good. I needed a better way.

I began trying different note taking methods then it hit me. Why not apply the same visualization techniques used in design to the note-taking process? Why not give some context to the notes by adding graphical elements to the information? To put it simply, I began adding home-grown contextual icons in the side margin of the pages to show specific aspects within the notes.

The productivity results have been huge.

I developed  simple icon drawings to use during meetings. The productivity results have been huge. I can pick up week-old meetings notes and at a glance know just what I need to do. No more reading & interpreting chicken scratch. The icons are so simple anyone can draw them. The method is to add them to the side margin as you’re writing the notes. The basic codex looks like this:

Click to enlarge:

Schedule a Meeting

Important

Question

Email to

Create or Action Item

Research

Check Into

Figure Out

Schedule

Idea

Here’s a before and after example:

Click to enlarge:

Before

After

The example on the left has no context of the written text whereas the eye can easily focus on specific actions with the example on the right.

I can scan the notes and figure out what sort of action needs to take then cross off the icon as I complete the items.

This may not work for everyone but it’s helped me get better control of the information overload and my hope is that it might help you too.

Altera Performance Group - New Media Marketing & Technology